“But, you know. I’m not . . . Carlos is . . .” I felt embarrassed.
Winnie seemed to understand. “He can be your
secret
boyfriend.
Maybe you can tell him you’ll suck his balls.” She started giggling nonstop. She’d meant his penis, but she’d said “balls.”
She started in on her usual lecture: “You’re pretty; you just need to try harder. You do things to hurt your own reputation.” Everything you did and said, who you sat with at lunch and how you wore your hair, comprised your reputation at Holy Cross. “You know what the girls are saying about you?”
“What?”
“That you were sitting in class the other day with your legs wide open like you were trying to show off to the boys. Why do you do things like that?” she said.
“I don’t remember,” I said, feeling my stomach drop. “I don’t always remember what I do.”
Winnie sighed. She sounded sad when she said, “But that’s
why
everyone says you’re crazy.”
The Story, a fantasy world that Peter and I went into every time we talked on the phone, was about people who turned into tigers. Even though I was older now, tigers still fueled my fantasies. The main character’s name was Margaux. She hadn’t been a tiger person originally; she had been a normal, happy girl in love with a pet shop owner, Peter. But then she met a handsome rock star and tiger man, Carlos, who made love to her, which passed the werecat curse on to her so she, too, would turn into a tiger. He got her pregnant with a werecat daughter, Desiree. She married Carlos and they moved into a townhouse in Connecticut. Peter couldn’t stand being separated from Margaux, so she hired him as a babysitter for Desiree, and he moved in with her and Carlos. Carlos and Peter eventually became friends though they both loved Margaux. Peter was much smarter than Carlos, and he was the only nontiger person, so he took care of everyone. In part, the Story was influenced by my vivid memory of watching the bloody 1982 horror movie
Cat People
with Poppa when I was five.
Once I entered the Story, the fifth-grade Margaux, of the pimples and the brown bobbed hair, of the black eyes and the knees bruised from practicing landing like a cat, the Margaux who had no party to go to, no sleepover to attend, no boy who had a crush on her, that Margaux vanished. The only thing that came from that Margaux was her name. Margaux of the Story was twenty, she was rich from publishing novels, she had a rock star husband and an additional man who loved her so much that he didn’t even care that she was married to someone else. He could not help but love her because she was so beautiful. I saw this Margaux clearly: she looked like Cindy Crawford. In the Story, she was standing by the eyelet curtain in the kitchen, watching Peter cook eggs sunny-side up as the baby Desiree cooed in the high chair, her long blond-streaked hair in a French twist (the kind you could easily make with a Topsy Tail), her arms and legs completely hairless and a velvet choker around her neck. Margaux also occasionally worked as a model and needed to go to photo shoots right after breakfast. There she was in the bedroom, undressing in front of a full-length mirror; there she was in the shower with Carlos and he was washing her hair; there she was driving her convertible; and there she was riding her horse, a beautiful, well-muscled palomino. There she was changing from human to animal: the bright fur was bursting like bonfires from her pores, her eyes were changing from brown to green, her dress was breaking apart. When she was her tiger self, Peter would chain her up in the basement so she wouldn’t kill anyone. He would bring her meat and water, often rubbing her belly to coax her back into human form.
Often on Friday and Saturday nights, we talked about the Story from nine p.m. until two in the morning while my mother listened to the radio or her records. When I talked about it, I couldn’t get tired, I couldn’t get hungry or thirsty, I didn’t see anything around me, only the scenes in my head. The only sounds I heard were Peter’s and my voice.
Though I loved talking to Peter, I had a strange reaction at Hudson Park when my mother and I unexpectedly bumped into him, Inès, and the boys. With a huge smile, Peter waved hi but as soon as he did, I took off running. The next time we talked on the phone he asked why, and I didn’t know, so I said it must have been because the sight of him was a sad reminder that I wasn’t allowed to go to his house anymore.
One night during a Story marathon, I heard giggling in the background.
“Who’s that?” I asked, not enjoying the fact that the Story was interrupted.
“Jenny and Renee. Oh, I didn’t tell you about them yet? They’re foster kids. I got them after Karen was taken from me.”
“Who took Karen?” I said.
“Her mother. Karen didn’t want to go back. They never do. She was gripping my shirt for dear life. The social worker had to pry her fingers off.”
“Oh.” I felt sad hearing this story.
“Wanna say hi to Renee? She’s only a year older than you.”
I didn’t really want to but he put her on anyway. She was a silly, giddy type with a nasal laugh. She told me she collected plastic trolls. I considered them ugly, but for her I pretended to like them. I noticed she called Peter “Dad.” She seemed to love him as much as I did, as much as Karen had. I would talk to Renee on the phone only once more and then Peter said that, just like Karen, Renee and Jenny had been returned to their mother. He also said it was starting to get too sad to foster any more kids and that he never would be able to do it again.
Only once during our separation did I make the mistake of calling Peter when Poppa was home. I heard him pick up the downstairs phone, press a few buttons, then pretend to hang up, trying to listen. I hung up and heard shouts erupting downstairs, but Poppa never once confronted me about it.
W
innie kept her association with me secret up until the end of fifth grade, when I managed to befriend Irene Palozzi as well. Irene had started out teasing me one day during gym, but then I surprised her by actually standing up for myself. I didn’t even remember doing it, but it turned out to be a charmed move because it won me her friendship, finally allowing Winnie to be seen with me in public. From then on, Irene, a big-haired, bigmouthed Union City cop’s daughter, became my protector. That year, she even threatened to beat up a popular boy for saying I had bugs in my hair. At the start of sixth grade, our trio was joined by a fourth girl: Grace Sanchez. She was as good-looking as any
Seventeen
cover girl but far too meek to fit in with the class’s four most popular girls, who had, at first, wanted to recruit her into their clique. She admitted to us she’d found the “in” girls so intimidating that, at their lunch table, she hadn’t been able to get a single word out loud enough for them to hear. Irene was constantly telling Grace to speak up and was fond of making me over during recess with her purse’s supply of blushers, lipsticks, eye shadows, and her travel-size bottle of Aqua Net. Our music teacher, Mr. Conroy, a Patrick Swayze look-alike whose attention every girl vied for, seemed to favor me even over the Cleopatra-haired Grace. “It’s because she’s a major flirt,” Irene explained to our little group once, mocking the unconscious habit I had of looking down at the floor, then up at a man’s face, always beaming the instant his eyes met mine.
Occasionally, this other, unknown side of me allowed me to assert my will against what I considered to be injustice. I was extremely mindful of Winnie, and whenever someone hurt her, even mildly, the part of me that rarely surfaced would immediately rise up to her defense. Once Winnie told me that she’d seen the most popular girl slip crushed glass into her soda, so in the hallway I came right up to the girl I’d been so terrified of for so many years. Our chests nearly touching, I demanded, “What did Winnie ever do to you?” She gave me a puzzled look and kept turning to glance at me as she made her way back to class.
With my new friends, there were sporadic moments when I felt myself to be like any other eleven-year-old girl. But deep down, I knew I wasn’t. I still talked to Peter on the phone once a week, a secret I could never let them in on. I was closest with Winnie, but even she didn’t seem capable of completely knowing me. Plus, she wasn’t nearly as devoted as Peter. When I gave her half of a best-friends-forever locket, I noticed that she stopped wearing hers within a few days. She told me her mother wouldn’t let her wear it, but I thought the real reason was that deep down inside she still thought I was a freak.
Instead of being happy that I had a few friends now, Poppa sometimes screamed, “Shut up! I hate your voice!” when I laughed or talked on the phone with Winnie anywhere near him. If my mother showed him one of my better report cards, all he would manage was a gruff “Good.” Sometimes it was as if he didn’t want me to exist anymore.
Protecting our house were two sturdy locks: a single-cylinder rim spring latch and a Yale 3000 residential deadbolt. Occasionally, Poppa bragged about his locks. He was fond of saying that if a burglar, rapist, or serial killer were ever to try to get past those locks he’d make so much of a racket that Poppa would have time to get his pistol, which he always kept fully loaded.
That fall we were on the bus heading home from Holy Cross when Mommy looked in her purse’s usual compartment for her house keys and found they weren’t there. We got off at our usual stop across from Washington School, walked over to the pay phone in front of La Popular bodega, and Mommy asked for Peter’s number; she knew I had it memorized.
She must have registered the shock on my face because she said, “I think I remember leaving them on the kitchen table. Peter’s a locksmith. If we could just get into the house, we could get them and your father would never have to know this happened.”
When he didn’t answer our telephone call, we walked to his house. We didn’t talk; we were both lost in our own thoughts. I was so nervous about seeing Peter again that I took a package of Bubble Tape out of my schoolbag, opened it, and started pulling out the long band of pink gum without breaking off any to chew. I was still in my navy blue jumper with my light blue blouse underneath, my navy blue ankle socks, and Buster Browns. I looked at the overcast sky where the clouds made stark, disembodied shapes just like those in the paintings on our walls at home. “Wait! I think I see the house!” I sang in a strange bright voice. “There it is!” my mother said, her face breaking into a big grin.
The front door had been left wide open, so, on realizing that after all this time the bell was still broken, Mommy and I just walked in. Peter was coming down the stairs as we were about to start up. His hair was much more silver now than sandy. He was wearing paint-streaked gray overalls and a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt, and his vigorous, handsome face was flushed with happy surprise.
He squeezed me so hard that for a second all I could feel was that hug, and I tucked my face deep into his chest, the way I had always done. He smelled like Spackle mixed with dog fur. And when I lifted my eyes to his mouth I noticed it was pulled into an affectionate pout like the face a teenage heartthrob makes on a magazine cover. I felt like we were living in a romantic movie in which he had the starring role.
“I missed you so much,” he said.
As we went upstairs to have a snack and catch up I could feel memories snatching and creeping at the edges of my mind. Right before we had stopped seeing each other two years ago, Peter had begun to hit me if I misbehaved. When no one was around, he had occasionally delivered a slap on the cheek or a blow to my hand—nothing compared to what Poppa did to Mommy, but it surprised me just the same. It was almost as if after we’d been to the basement that time for his birthday present, he felt he should treat me more like his wife.
When my mother went to use the bathroom he said, “You’ve got to find a way to convince your father to let us see each other again. I feel like I can’t live without you. Don’t you feel like you can’t live without me?”
“Yes,” I heard myself say, loving him again like we’d never been separated.
“I wash my hands of this matter,” Poppa said. He had finally calmed down from his tirade and was now sitting at the kitchen table, working on a gold bracelet. His mouth was tight with concentration; his jeweler’s loupe hid the upper part of his face. I sat on a chair perpendicular to his, pretending to work on terminating decimals. “That is what Pilate said to the crowd:‘I wash my hands.’ The crowd had the final say. The masses always have the deciding vote. There are two of you and there is one of me. Therefore, I have decided to abstain from the ballot.”
Mommy stood by the stove a few feet away from him in her long flowered nightgown and slippers. Her arms were crossed over her chest. “Well, I’m glad. Because Margaux hasn’t been well and you know that. You can’t always be so selfish and controlling. The boys have friends over, all the time. In the summer, neighborhood kids come into the yard to play in the sprinklers; that’s what Peter says. I know you refuse to believe it, but they are a nice family! They’re poor, but they’re nice!”
Poppa shook his head. “So were the bitch and the banker, remember? But the bitch in Connecticut has a nice house in Westport. When the banker left her, she did not have to worry because of the size of the alimony checks. Some people get rich on the blood of others, they feed like parasites but yet they don’t give anything! A simple loan to her brother-in-law! I would have paid her back! The nerve of her to think I would not have paid her back! I am a man of my word!”
“Oh, don’t start, please, Margaux doesn’t need to hear this screaming. We’ve been over this so many times.”
“I could have put a down payment on that house in Nutley! Then she wouldn’t have even met those savages! Everything would have been different. That bitch ruined my life!”
“Stop calling my sister a bitch.”
“Oh, your sister. Your sister! As though that bitch can be called family. I trust that man Peter as much as I can trust that bitch to call us up right now and invite us over there. On a clear, bright Saturday, when the weather is warm and the driving smooth! That is how much I trust that man!”